AI is here for plumbers and electricians. Will it transform home services?

Netic, a startup based in San Francisco, is selling an AI-based platform that helps home-services firms automatically reach out to clients in need of maintenance or upgrades, and takes calls and messages on their behalf.

Founded in 2024, Netic is part of a growing crop of startups looking beyond the saturated white-collar market and toward home-services operators like electricians, plumbers, roofers and HVAC—which stands for heating, ventilation and air conditioning—specialists.

The startup Monday said it has raised $20 million with funding from venture-capital firms including Greylock and Founders Fund.

While Netic’s mission to automate sales and business operations seems simple, it can be a challenge to actually integrate AI into services businesses that run on manual labor—and it certainly can’t replace the work of skilled human technicians.

The rise of AI in skilled trades is getting a boost from private-equity firms, which have invested heavily in the area and are now injecting the technology into their portfolio companies—hoping for productivity gains and hefty returns. Netic’s customers are mostly private-equity-owned home-services companies, as well as some larger owner-operated firms, the startup said.

Asheem Chandna, an investor at venture-capital firm Greylock who served as lead investor in Netic’s seed round, said home-services businesses often have “underutilized capacity," or staff who aren’t being put to work most efficiently. The point of AI, then, is to optimize the pairing of technicians with customers when they need help, and to reach them before they do, Chandna said.

Netic’s platform, which uses generative AI models and fine-tuned language models, is designed to use a certain AI model for each technology function, from customer verification to urgency and priority analysis, said Melisa Tokmak, the startup’s founder and chief executive..

For instance, Netic’s algorithms pick up on signals from customer calls, bumping a regular maintenance call to lower priority or escalating repairs for weather and emergencies. Or, a customer who has a quote from a rival firm might be pushed to the top. To help drive sales, Netic’s AI creates marketing campaigns that predict when customers might need a maintenance call based on data like an impending storm, the region and property type.

The platform also works with various customer management software for the trades, Tokmak said, and is meant to minimize the amount of integration between software that businesses have to deal with.

One customer, Chris Hoffmann, CEO of St. Louis-based home-services company HB Solutions Group, said that many startups are automating the work of booking appointments over the phone through AI voice agents. Hoffmann gets so many pitches for AI products, he said, that he’s often turning down vendors hawking their wares.

But Netic’s AI platform, along with taking calls and answering messages with more accuracy and recall than humans can, helps Hoffmann Brothers plan and prioritize which of the firm’s hundreds of technicians should take appointments and when, he said.

“I have to match my capacity with my customer demand on a daily basis," Hoffman said. “And that’s really hard, because I don’t always get to choose how many people’s air conditioners are going to break when they call me."

Still, even with the amount of AI that Hoffmann has put into his firm, only 20% of customer calls are being answered by Netic’s AI platform.

“We’re still human first," he added.